Gilbert Cruz
Appearances
The Daily
The Year in Books
Um, the five fiction books, some of them might be familiar to you. All Fours by Miranda July, Good Material by Dolly Alderton, James by Percival Everett, Martyr by Kaveh Akbar, and You Dreamed of Empires by Alvaro Enrique.
The Daily
The Year in Books
I do. And I think it's the smallest book on this list, actually. It is You Dream of Empires by the Mexican writer Alvaro Enrique. And it essentially imagines the first meeting between Hernan Cortes and Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor, in what is now Mexico City in 1519. It is an imaginative sort of psychedelic look at what that encounter might have been like. It's very funny.
The Daily
The Year in Books
It's very sort of descriptively written, like there are smells and sights that pop off the page. And again, it's slim. And that's important when you're reading a lot of books over the course of a year.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Sure. So nonfiction is a mix of biography, history. We have stuff like Reagan by Max Boot. It's about Ronald Reagan. Everyone Who's Gone is Here by Jonathan Blitzer. The Wide, Wide Sea by Hampton Sides, which I will talk about in a minute because I really loved it. I Heard Her Call My Name by Lucy Sant. And then Cold Crematorium by Yosef Debrezeni.
The Daily
The Year in Books
The Wide, Wide Sea. So The Wide, Wide Sea is about Captain Cook, Captain James Cook. It's about his third and final voyage. He was sent in the year 1776, a year that we're all very familiar with, to the South Pacific to return a Polynesian man to his home island in the South Pacific. He was also sent to try to find... the Northwest Passage, which is something that many explorers were looking for.
The Daily
The Year in Books
It was not accessible at the time. And then something bad happened to him. He died. That is bad. That is bad. And I love this book so much because I just love tail set on the high seas. I love books about what it's like to be on a, you know, a big boat with big sails, drinking grog, possibly getting scurvy and not knowing what you're going to encounter the next day.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Well, the secret is that one does not. One relies on many other people. We decided to take advantage of the fact that we have access to thousands of authors who write reviews for us all the time and sort of lean on their expertise. These are all people that are extremely well-read. So we sent a survey out to 1,200 or so people. A lot of them were authors.
The Daily
The Year in Books
You know, Stephen King, Bonnie Garmis, Curtis Sittenfeld, R.L. Stine. Then we had editors in the publishing industry, people that own bookstores, librarians. famous people who read a lot of books, like Sarah Jessica Parker. We asked them what their 10 best books published in English since January 1st, 2000 were. We didn't define best for them at all.
The Daily
The Year in Books
We got back their responses, we added them all up, and we published a list of 100, which is a lot of books, to be fair.
The Daily
The Year in Books
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. My Brilliant Friend is a book in translation. It's translated by Anne Goldstein, and it's the first in a four-book series that we now refer to as the Neapolitan Quartet. The first book is about two young girls growing up in post-war Italy in the 1950s.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Well, so, I don't know if you can cast your mind back to the time when, like, Ferrante fever was sweeping the literary world.
The Daily
The Year in Books
These books were coming out and people were obsessed with them. And I think something that is undeniable about these books for people who love them is that they capture... female friendship in a way that is truly unique in 21st century literature.
The Daily
The Year in Books
There is something sort of realistic about the way that these two young girls, and they grew up over the course of these four books, come together and pull apart and love each other and hate each other. It is, I think the first book takes a while to get into, but once you get into it, if you connect with it, you sort of just want to keep reading all four books.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Absolutely. There's a book that came in at number six, 2666, by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. And it is one of these massive, slightly impenetrable literary works, partly having to do with the murder of hundreds of women in Mexico and partly to do with lots of other stuff. The fact that it came in so high was surprising to me.
The Daily
The Year in Books
There was a book that came in at number eight called Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, which is a book about a young man in mid-century Europe, sort of lusciously and beautifully written novel. This book came out in 2001. It was one of the oldest books on the list. And I don't know that it's particularly well-known these days. I was surprised by how high it placed.
The Daily
The Year in Books
I would say flip that on its head and think about how much reading, how much wonderful, delightful reading is ahead of you. You can feel badly about this or you can say, oh my God, look at all these amazing books I want to read. I did not. I'm looking at my tally right now, which I'm 100% not going to tell you what the number is. And it's embarrassing.
The Daily
The Year in Books
I'm the editor of the New York Times Book Review. I should have read more books on our list than this.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Yeah. I mean, look, I bring up all the time I still have not read Middlemarch by George Eliot, but I have read... I don't know, The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, right? So which is more valuable? I don't think there's an answer to that. I think it's just where your taste leads you.
The Daily
The Year in Books
And I will say, if you look at this list of 100 and you see only one or two books that you want to read that you've never read before, then we succeeded. We did this whole thing and we found one book for you, the right book for you, success.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Absolutely. The one that stuck with me above all is Lincoln and the Bardo by George Saunders. A beautiful book, a book I should have read a long time ago. And it's a book that imagines Abraham Lincoln going to the cemetery where his son has been interred. And he is surrounded by a cacophony of voices, all these ghosts in the cemetery. And it was just so moving.
The Daily
The Year in Books
So beautiful, so odd and bizarre in its own way. I was like, everyone needs to read this immediately. I just, I did. I fell in love with it.
The Daily
The Year in Books
Sure. So a bunch of editors and critics over the course of the year, really, are meeting monthly. And at every one of those meetings, we're discussing books that we think are great. And these are books that sort of go through the ringer. We're really debating them over the course of the whole year. At the end of October, which is when this process ends, we take a vote.